Category Archives: British

Sometimes I wonder about the people who think up names for military and espionage operations. Sometimes those names are perfect.

Like Unthinkable.

It’s April 1945. The Allies sweep into Germany on two fronts, racing toward Berlin. The German capitol could’ve been the scene of a catastrophic clash of west and east if both sides had insisted on the prestige of taking the city. But the Americans wanted to avoid a confrontation with Moscow, and the Red Army was the first to raise its flag over Berlin.

This seemed to form part of a rude awakening for Winston Churchill. He’d assumed the Soviets would end the war weaker than American and British forces. But the Red Army had rolled over eastern territories, greatly expanding its sphere of influence. Above all, Poland had slipped into this Russian net. Britain’s responsibility for defending Poland’s sovereignty was a basis for entering the war to begin with. How could Britain stand by and let the Russians finish what the Germans started?

Mix this with Churchill’s anticommunism, and the unthinkable — a third world war directly after the second — was actually considered.

Churchill asked the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan to advance forces east against their old ally, the Soviet Union. It would have to be a surprise attack, because the staff recognized this would be the West’s only advantage in the face of Soviet strength.

Even more unthinkable, the plan called for German Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the West. About 2 million Germans had surrendered to British custody. Some units weren’t disbanded; they were renamed Dienstgruppen (service groups) and used for labor. Confiscated weapons weren’t immediately destroyed. Some were stockpiled, while others were destroyed after a lag time that puzzled German soldiers held prisoner but with full kits and equipment. As one ex-soldier recalled, they could have started another war.

British planners concluded the whole idea was too big a risk. The Red Army was too strong, and the political fall out of an offensive war was too large. With a few exceptions such as the notoriously bellicose General Patton, the Americans weren’t interested in continuing a military advance into eastern Europe (at that time). In Britain, public opinion wouldn’t be on Churchill’s side. The Russians were still considered an ally that fought heroically against a common enemy.

So Operation Unthinkable never got off the ground. An active, hot war between west and east was discarded for a cold one that might not be as finished as we thought it was.

If you understand German, check out this video that summarizes Operation Unthinkable. The British historian Dr. Christopher Knowles (congrats on the PhD!) summarized the operation a few years ago on his excellent blog.

I found this little gem during my last trip to London. It’s a reproduction of the handbook published by the Foreign Office in 1944. The war was still on, and as British forces pushed into Germany, the Tommies needed a bit of guidance for how to deal with what was still an enemy people. Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany could be called a pre-occupation manual. It looked forward to the immediate postwar era, and has much in common with the similar American handbook I mentioned on the blog awhile back.

Maybe the biggest similarity is the booklet’s appeal for soldiers to rein in their natural tendency to feel compassion for people who look like (and are) suffering. That these are Germans, collectively held responsible for the war at that time, didn’t matter. The writers from the Political Warfare Executive recognized what might happen to young soldiers sweeping into an environment largely free of German men. Ruined cities and towns where women, old people and children welcomed western troops like liberators. The American and British booklets were clear. Western forces didn’t enter Germany to liberate it, they came to conquer.

That meant establishing a conqueror’s distance from the defeated. Fraternization was forbidden, and shortly before the end of the war, soldiers could be fined for doing it. The reality of life in occupied Germany soon put a stop to the stricter rules. In the forward of the Bodleian Library’s reissued Instructions, John Pinfold mentions a Daily Express cartoon from July 1945 that showed German women chasing British soldiers through a wood. The caption: “Rough on us chaps that don’t want to fraternise, isn’t it?”

The booklet has sections that made me laugh and cringe. A section titled “What the Germans are Like” was so good, I had to read it to my German husband. The list of negative traits and stereotypes was long, but I giggled at the sentence, “The Germans have, of course, many good qualities.” (My husband says the same thing about Americans, and with the same dry tone.) A British person reading the booklet now would probably be interested in the section “What the Germans Think of Us.” Generally positive, due to what the booklet called British “national virtues” like tolerance, fairness and decency.

And that’s the booklet’s true value. It helps us understand one view of how Britons saw Germans and themselves at a turning point in the Twentieth Century.